Frédéric Hemmer Email Address

Information Technology Department Head Adviser

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is one of the world's largest and most respected centres for scientific research. Its business is fundamental physics, finding out what the Universe is made of and how it works.

Frédéric Hemmer studied Electrical and Mechanical Engineering (and Computing) in Brussels. He joined CERN in 1984 where he served as Systems Engineer in Databases, Real-Time Systems and more generally Distributed Computing. In the 1990’s he became the software architect of the CERN SHIFT project aiming at moving High-Energy Physics applications from Mainframes to Distributed RISC/Unix systems, later migrated to PC/Linux systems. He has been the initial author of the RFIO remote file access protocol, in use until 2010. From 1994 he took the responsibility of operating the Physics Data Processing Services at CERN (100’s of machines, Terabytes’s of data, Gigabit/second interconnections). As of 1998 he took responsibility of CERN Windows service (> 5000 computers) and later Mail and Web Services. In 2004 he joined the EGEE (Enabling Grid for E-sciencE) project where he served as Middleware Reengineering Manager (coordinating Grid Middleware development of 80 people across 8 countries). In 2005 he was appointed as CERN Deputy IT Department Head (280 Staff, 200 visitors, 50 MCHF budget in 2006) and served as CERN representative in various EC project management boards. Since 2009 he is heading the CERN IT department. He is a member of IEEE and ACM.